Updating an old dinosaur of a site to WordPress (3.5.1), one of the more popular pages on the old site is a âRelated Linksâ page with links for and about kids. (e.g. fitness, nutrition, education, bicycle safety etc.). We frequently receive email from teachers all over the U.S. indicating that — as the result of some sort of class project — their students have found sites they think relevant, asking if we would include the link(s) theyâve found on our âRelated Linksâ page.
On the new WordPress site we would like to improve on the old âRelated Linksâ page, providing users a means of submitting a request for inclusion (something like moderated comments? ) with a text-area to input the details of the request ( comments? ) a field for the suggested link, a field to suggest tags (or categories ) as a means of categorizing the links, and a user email field for contact/validation.
Ideally, approved link submissions would be sortable by category, age or popularity (via Google Analytics ), with a credit line for the submitting user e.g. …
( Courtesy of Little Suzie Smith, Mrs. Jones 3rd Grade Class 2012-2013 )
I fear this may require developing a plugin specifically for the case, but would sure feel silly re-inventing this wheel if there already exists the means to accomplish it without.
Any Suggestions as to how this might be implemented (or approximated ) using an existing plugin and / or existing WP functionality ?
You could use Gravity Forms and generate a draft of a custom post type on submission. The form could contain the URL and all other fields. Nice thing about Gravity Forms is the fields can all be validated and has decent anti-spam measures. It also has hooks to do other tasks such as the post-generation.
When a form submission is received, it can send an email… then it’d be a matter of approving or trashing the post. The form fields can be mapped to custom meta values related to the post, even taxonomies. It is even possible to populate existing taxonomy terms to fields (select dropdown, for example) within the form itself.
There is certainly a learning-curve and a bit of cost in acquiring a developer’s license (if you plan to use it multiple times), however.